1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for mediating safety drive information, wherein safety drive information for each of contract motorcars is transmitted to a family and/or a management company for a driver of the corresponding motorcar via a safety drive information mediating apparatus. The present invention also relates to a method for confirming such safety drive information, a program and a storage medium, all of which are used for the system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order that a family and/or a managing company for a driver of a motorcar receives safety drive information as to whether or not the motorcar is running in a safe drive state, it is traditionally necessary to confirm whether or not the driver is currently being in a safety drive state by keeping a direct contact with a driver's own cellular phone or the like. In this case, however, the driver himself has to be in communication with the family and/or the company by such a cellular phone in the driving state, thereby causing to induce a problem in the safety drive. If, moreover, the driver himself cannot make a call with the cellular phone due to a possible accident encountered, it is impossible to directly convey accident information to his family by such a cellular phone.
Normally, on the basis of a subjective view of the driver himself, such a family or management company receives only information that he is currently being in a safety drive state, and therefore the information cannot be always regarded as safety drive information on the basis of an objective data.
Regarding such a system for providing vehicle information including the safety drive information, a method of managing vehicles has been disclosed (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-318844). In this system, position information, velocity information, status information (i.e., information about the operation condition of an engine, an electrical system and a mechanical system), safety/crisis managing information and others are real-time collected from a motorcar, a synthetic management and analysis of the data thus collected allow the status of the vehicle management, the status of a traffic jam and the car drive state to be recognized, and further make it possible to promptly cope with the safety/crisis, so that a system for synthetically managing information about movable objects effectively used for various services can be provided. The information supplied from the system may provide data to a transportation trader, road controlling organization, automobile maker, road information provider or the like for a consideration, and also serves to supply individual information from the transportation trader, road controlling organization, or motorcar maker to each person in a vehicle. The real time information as for the vehicle drive operation can be used, for instance to estimate the insurance rate. In the above-mentioned prior art, moreover, among various bits of the information supplied from the motorcar, the air bag operation status, the acceleration due to the collision, the inclination of the car body (an inclination greater than a specific angle being regarded as a fall or tipping) and/or an emergency notice from a driver (a button operation or an alarm sound) is used. Since the information includes a vehicle abnormal status, the content of the emergence notice and others, a vehicle managing center or a road managing center is capable of coping with such an emergency state.
In the above-mentioned system, however, the transportation trader, road controlling organization, automobile maker, or road information provider is assumed to be an information receiver, and aims the post-usage of the data, so that the system cannot be regarded as a system which enables a family of the vehicle driver or a managing company thereof to confirm a safety drive in the current state.
Moreover, in the above-mentioned system of the prior art, it is assumed that information is collected by a computer or the like on the side of the information receiver. As a result, it is difficult for the family of the driver to securely ascertain the safety drive of the driver at anytime and at any location using the system of the prior art.
As described above, a system having a relatively larger scale in an office is regarded as an information receiver in the conventional system for providing the vehicle information including the safety drive information, thereby making it impossible to obtain safety drive information in which a driver is currently being in a safety drive state.